“The good times are middling, the bad times are bad,” wrote Edna O’Brien in the summer of 1958 in one of the journals she kept meticulously throughout her life. Then, in red ink—tight, scolding, almost schoolmasterly—came a furious annotation: “but not her fault. Nothing to do with her adolescent vanity.” The interjection wasn’t hers. It was from Ernest Gébler, O’Brien’s ex-husband, who defaced her diaries after she left him and moved to London. In a family photo album, beneath a picture of O’Brien with their two sons, he added another characteristic flourish: “Before I made her famous and the rot set in.”
Gébler’s petty vindictiveness—he was also a writer, though a far less celebrated one—is among the more dismaying revelations in Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, a new documentary by filmmaker Sinéad O’Shea. O’Brien’s diaries are just one of the tools O’Shea uses to illuminate a complicated, dazzling life.
The film draws from archival footage—O’Brien in her youth, fielding condescension from smug chat show hosts; O’Brien as a daughter, visibly ill at ease beside her austere parents—and interweaves these with interviews from her later years. The result is an intimate portrait of O’Brien across time. We see her as a young woman, a middle-aged one, and an old one—almost simultaneously. There’s something haunting in that, and close-to-the-bone. It’s hard not to feel, watching, that you’re also seeing a version of your own life flash by—its fullness, its swiftness.
That O’Brien, at 93, patently did not want to leave it all behind is one of the film’s most poignant insights.
“ I don’t think she felt peaceful as she countenanced death,” says O’Shea. “I met her shortly after the doctors had decided to stop treating her and she was really upset, and rightly so, and terrified about where she was going to go.”
O’Shea first met O’Brien while profiling her for Publisher’s Weekly. “She made this huge impression on me,” she recalls. “By far the most entertaining and beguiling person I’d ever interviewed.” But the idea for the documentary took shape much later, at a wedding, when O’Shea was encouraged by a fellow guest: the formidable producer Barbara Broccoli, a close friend of O’Brien’s.
In August 2023, O’Shea sat down for her first interview with O’Brien—just a day before the author was hospitalized. Not long after, O’Brien began sending her voice memos from her bed, filled with instructions, opinions, names to contact, names to avoid. Then came a turning point: O’Brien suggested that O’Shea visit Emory College in Georgia, where her diaries were held.
“At first, we thought I could just read them over Zoom with the librarian’s help,” says O’Brien. She had a small baby at the time, and no money. “It was all being self-financed and it was really messy and incredible.” She tells a story of the librarian in Georgia reading O’Brien’s diaries aloud to her. “It was about her visits to [legendary Scottish psychiatrist] R.D.Laing, with whom she took LSD. And the librarian was this very demure woman, and she kept looking at me, and going, ‘Here comes another bit,’ and it would be something truly salacious.”
But it’s Gébler’s marginalia that is most astounding. “It’s just so wonderfully ironic that he thinks by correcting and undermining her that he’s asserting himself as the moral authority,” says O’Shea. “His entire contention is that she’s shallow, she’s vain, she’s narcissistic, and instead it’s the complete opposite. You have no doubt that he’s the narcissist, that he’s completely self-absorbed, that he is ruthlessly competitive.”
It’s just years and years and years of her saying the same thing, several times a day over and over again: Is he going to call? I hate myself. I’m so ashamed. This is so terrible. Just that, on repeat thousands of times, and it’s so humiliating and dark for her.
Sinéad O’Shea
O’Shea structures the film chronologically, allowing the viewer to experience O’Brien’s youthful infatuation with Gébler—at one point, the two elope to the Isle of Man—before her inevitable disillusionment. Her literary breakthrough, The Country Girls (1960), was both a scandal and a sensation. The story of two young women coming of age in priest-ridden County Limerick was banned—and even burned—in Ireland for what today seems only modest sexual frankness. It launched a career limned by critical acclaim and cultural backlash. Subsequent novels fared little better. For years, O’Brien was forced to sign over her royalty checks to Gébler—until, finally, she refused.
In London, free of her husband and financially independent, O’Brien became a magnet for literary and celebrity circles, feted by writers such as Philip Roth and John Updike. Her Portobello Road home was a party den for Princess Margaret, Judy Garland, Paul McCartney, Richard Burton, Marianne Faithfull, and Jane Fonda. She dated Robert Mitchum, and later, a high-profile British politician—unnamed, but strongly hinted at. The affair was long and tortured.
“I think she’s in her late forties at the time–and those diaries are truly crackers,” says O’Shea. “You can’t actually include them that much in the film because they’re just so repetitive, but it’s the repetitiveness that’s actually the magic. It’s just years and years and years of her saying the same thing, several times a day over and over again: Is he going to call? I hate myself. I’m so ashamed. This is so terrible. Just that, on repeat thousands of times, and it’s so humiliating and dark for her. She’s, like, I’m nearly two thirds of the way through my life, and she really felt like she was at the end, and she’s not even halfway there. She’s got these whole new phases of literary life. She starts to write political novels. She begins whole new obsessions with whole new unsuitable people. There’s so much ahead of her and she has no idea of it because she feels so hopeless. And I would really like to try to remember that rather than have to live it.”
Edna O’Brien never saw the finished documentary. “We were racing to get it done in time for Toronto,” O’Shea says. “There was this grand idea that Edna would see it on her deathbed and rally—that she wouldn’t die. Which, in hindsight, was a bit much.” Still, O’Brien was told the film had been accepted to the Toronto Film Festival just weeks before her death. “I think that brought her some comfort,” says O’Shea. “She’d given so much of her final year to it. She felt vindicated.”
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is now on general release in the UK and Ireland.
AN EDNA O’BRIEN PRIMER by Sinéad O’Shea
Start with Country Girls (1960). It’s Edna’s first book and though it was published in 1960, it still feels so lively and funny and sad. She is writing about the idea of escape, romance, toxic teenage friendships and terrible men being propped up by a patriarchal society. It is timeless and true and the first of a trilogy of novels that made her name.
A Pagan Place (1970) is my favourite book by Edna O’Brien and I think marks a very significant point in her life and career. She had been very prolific—as her son Sasha told us, she was writing a book every year! This was a relatively experimental portrait of her childhood within the repressive patriarchal society of Ireland at the time.
She worked on A Pagan Pace with the legendary editor, Robert Gottlieb and it’s a magnificent evocation of Ireland and a home that is defined by abuse. However it was not as well received as her earlier, more straightforward, books and I think she was unnerved by this. During this time, she was a patient of RD Laing and she decided to take LSD with him. It was an agonizing trip and she struggled for years with its aftereffects. I wish she had kept faith with the achievements of A Pagan Place.
She finally published The High Road in 1988 but this wasn’t liked either, and she attempted suicide while on press trip to publicize the book.
Eventually she began to write more overtly political fiction in the 1990s beginning with the House of Splendid Isolation (1994). I think The Little Red Chairs (2015) best represents the bravery and achievements of this second act. It’s a book set in the west of Ireland about a woman who is desperate to be a mother and begins fertility treatment with a mysterious doctor who has moved to her village from abroad. His identity is based on the story of Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian warlord who disguised himself as a healer. It’s wry and horrifying and very plausible in this time of fragmented faith and conflict.
